The Communications of the TEX Users Group Volume 30 ... - TUG

198 TUGboat, Volume 30 (2009), No. 2
(LSI, lightningsource.com). Karl chose 7 × 10
inches as the page size from the sizes supported
by LSI, because it was not so big that it would require
a two-column format, but otherwise the biggest
available, so minimizing the number of pages and
print cost.
Karl developed the m4-to-L ATEX definition file
(tug.org/interviews/book/texdefs.m4) for converting
the m4 files for each interview into L ATEX files
for each interview. Naturally, this evolved as new
issues were discovered as the conversion into L ATEX
proceeded. As an example, one of the shorter m4
interview files is available at tug.org/interviews/
book/gordon.m4 (Peter Gordon’s interview) and the
resulting L ATEX file at tug.org/interviews/book/
gordon.inc.
Some of the interviews had never been in the
m4 format, and Karl converted the HTML for these
earlier interviews into the m4 format using Emacs,
Perl, and other Unix tools. This enabled all the
interviews to be handled uniformly for the book
and provided the option of later converting all the
interviews, as cleaned up for the book, back to HTML
to improve the interviews web site. Karl then edited
all of these m4 files further to eliminate typos, other
broken or awkward text, and generate well-typeset
L ATEX, following the same general conventions longestablished
for TUGboat.
In addition to Karl, Barbara Beeton (whose reputation
for editing prowess is well known in the TEX
community) also edited each interview, reviewed the
formatting, and so on. As with TUGboat, Barbara
and Karl strived to achieve appropriate English for
each interview while maintaining as much as possible
the interviewee’s voice.
Next, Dave circulated the edited and typeset
interviews back to the interviewees for approval and
possibly for an additional update, usually written as
an endnote; most interviewees chose to leave their
interviewcurrentasoftheoriginalinterviewenddate.
Dave also began to solicit higher resolution photos as
part of these exchanges with the interviewees (since
we desired the photos to be about 2 inches wide, we
asked for photos that were at least 600 pixels wide);
Dave also used Photoshop to convert many of the
color photos to grayscale and to adjust the contrast,
etc., of all photos to improve how well they printed
in a black and white book.
Finally, Dave and Karl drafted the preface, title
pages, and other front matter, and integrated them
into the Makefile which built the entire book.
5 Technical L ATEX details
In addition to the texdefs.m4 file mentioned above,
Karl Berry and David Walden
Karl developed a Makefile (tug.org/interviews/
book/GNUmakefile) to automatically convert all of
the m4 files into L ATEX files, and then compile the
L ATEX files for the interviews and the frontmatter
files into one complete PDF. The master L ATEX file
which the Makefile calls to compile the book is at
tug.org/interviews/book/ivbook.tex.
5.1 Table of contents
We considered several orderings for the interviews:
alphabetical was an obvious possibility, but added
nothing over a simple list of names; another was
grouping by category, such as putting related developers
together, but this proved too vague to be
meaningful. Finally we settled on chronological order.
We decided to have two tables of contents, one
chronological (the normal page number order, in this
scheme, written by L ATEX), and one alphabetical.
Karl wrote a script to sort the names and generate
the alphabetical contents from the chronological one
(tug.org/interviews/book/a-lphabetize).
5.2 The book style file
The master file, ivbook.tex, is mostly just a list of
the frontmatter and interview files in the order we
wanted to print them; the only notable thing is the
initial setup:
\documentclass{book}
\usepackage{ivbook}
That is, we use the basic L ATEX book style, augmented
with a style file. We have found that collecting
all customizations and settings in such a central
style file is a good idea for any significant project.
Here are the main things which our book style
file does (tug.org/interviews/book/ivbook.sty):
• It loads some standard packages: geometry to
specify the page layout, graphicx for handling
the photos, microtype to help with line breaking,
url for line breaking on urls, and fancyhdr
to specify our desired running header (and an
empty running footer).
• It loads babel with support for Vietnamese, for
the sake of two so-called “horned” letters in the
interview with Philip Taylor. We were grateful
that Hàn Thê´ Thành had created Vietnamese
glyphs for our font (among many others) as part
of the VnTEX project (vntex.sf.net).
• It specifies the fonts used. Karl wanted to use a
freely available font that was included in TEX
Live, and looked through the online L ATEX Font
Catalogue (tug.dk/FontCatalogue). He then
experimented with different choices—the Font